Plessner, Helmuth

Philosopher, sociologist

Born: 04.09.1892 in Wiesbaden

died: 12.06.1985 in Göttingen

Plessner, the son of a doctor with a private sanatorium, studied in Freiburg, Göttingen, Heidelberg and Erlangen, where he received his doctorate in 1916. Initially only interested in natural science, he also published his first philosophical publication in the same year: "Die wissenschaftliche Idee. An outline of its form". Alongside Hans Driesch, he was particularly captivated by the philosophies of Wilhelm Windelband and Edmund Husserl, who motivated Plessner to develop his own cosmos of ideas by interweaving aspects of human and biological science, psychology and sociology more and more stringently into his thinking.

Teaching as a private lecturer from 1920 and as an associate professor in Cologne from 1926, he produced high-profile essays that met with only a minimal response. The essay "Die Einheit der Sinne, Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des Geistes" (1923) came close to Dilthey's philosophy of life. Plessner countered the ideological search for meaning of the 1920s, always insisting on the freedom of man in his thoughts and actions, with the prognosticating analysis "Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. A Critique of Social Radicalism" (1924).

Plessner's main work became "Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch" (1928), a sociological anthropology influenced by phenomenology, which at least pre-formulated complexes of questions for future sociological theories. Plessner's exposed "trademark", the concept of "eccentric positionality", is linked to this study: in contrast to animals, humans must develop a reflexive relationship to themselves in their "openness to the world".

Plessner, who came from a Jewish family, was forced out of his career by the National Socialist dictatorship. He tried in vain to continue his work in Istanbul. Thanks to the anthropologist Frederik Buytendijk, he was offered a lectureship at the University of Groningen. As a result of the German occupation, he had to go into hiding. By then, he had already sent his work "The Fate of the German Spirit at the End of its Bourgeois Epoch" (1935) out into the world from exile. Unfortunately, this ideological-historical diagnosis of the character of the German people was not available again until 1959 under its new, now famous title "The Delayed Nation". In 1941, Plessner had published a fundamental presentation on a component of the interpretation of human nature, "Lachen und Weinen. An investigation into the limits of human behavior".

In 1951, Plessner was appointed to a professorship for sociology, including philosophy, at the University of Göttingen, where he was rector in 1960/61. Academic honors followed. Plessner became a pioneer in university research. In his discourses on cultural studies, the maverick thinker, whose authority was only recognized by a few, was to adhere to his ideas of the eccentric, which is impressively manifested in his treatise on "The Musicalization of the Senses", for example.